


if you want me, come and find me

by Dragunov



Category: Flashman Papers - George MacDonald Fraser
Genre: F/M, M/M, Vampire AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-30
Updated: 2012-11-30
Packaged: 2017-11-19 21:11:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragunov/pseuds/Dragunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And that is the game they play, the little traps across the continents and centuries, Flashman's strength to Rudi's superior skills, and when they’re finished they die, except they can’t really die, not yet, not ever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you want me, come and find me

**Author's Note:**

> I AM SO SORRY. I really am.  
> AND ALSO I read Royal Flash believing Rudi was blond the whole time and I maintain that oh well.

He is a man with at least two wives – one he loves, one who loves him – and countless mistresses across the world. He’s had women fighting for him, and running to escape; he’s had them in all ages, shapes and colors, in beds, haylofts, thickets, drawing-rooms, apartment buildings, palaces, hovels, cars, snowdrifts, baths, cellars, camps, covered wagons, even in the library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, which he can’t recommend. The longer he lives, the clearer he recalls their faces, and he has lived long, which is why they call him cursed. And he supposes any man with a conscience might feel cursed to remember all the people he has wronged, but Harry Flashman was born without God.

\---------

“Let’s kill them all.” Rudi says, eyes bright, spreading his sinewy arms and smiling brilliantly. The fire lights his blonde hair at the curls and causes an unnatural halo to glow about his face. If Harry Flashman was born without God, Count Rudi von Starnberg caused the Fall, and even without the curse, this is an ecstatic face he could never forget. “Leave with me, Harry. We could rule this country together, and if we couldn't – well, then we aren't the men I think we are.”

Harry knows the man he is. He can lie his way around the world, but he won’t lie to himself. And he knows the man Rudi is. Nothing like him.

Despite the fire, he feels a chill that comes from the darkest corners of Rudi’s little stone castle, comes from Rudi himself, and his skin shakes, and his stomach flips, because “You’re mad” he whispers, and Rudi is madness, and dangerous like a shark, and it’s in his nature to kill and keep moving, and there is no way to stop. “Raving mad. Why would I risk my neck for that?”

“Why not? Who’s to stop us? We could be rich.”

“I’d rather be poor and alive, thank you.”

Rudi stands, considering. A hand on his sabre, and the other rests against Harry’s precious neck, the thick muscles quivering there, the quickening of his pulse, and Rudi says, “So that’s it - you don’t trust me.” Harry’s laugh is like dry wind. It’s all he dares. Rudi has hurt him before, he has the scars to prove it, scars on his face, to go with those on his back, and Rudi says he looks dashing, that he’s not surprised all the girls throw themselves at Harry’s feet, and Harry is not sure how much he is being mocked, how much Rudi means it.

“But that’s the point!” Rudi cries. “We are perfect, Harry. Neither trusts the other, but you need me. And I need you.”

\---------

Harry has had a multitude of women, but there is only the one man.

\---------

He agrees, after a couple of carefully timed protests, “drink to it” Rudi says, and when Rudi turns to reach for the glass behind him, Harry breaks a wine bottle against the back of his head. Rudi sees it at the last second, the bottle and then Harry, but there’s no time to dodge. It shatters on his temple, wine drenching his shirt, blood flowing through his firey hair, and he staggers back a few steps before falling hard to the floor.

Harry hesitates, listening, then takes Rudi’s sabre and runs.

\---------

Harry lives. Harry always lives. And he lives to regret not killing Rudi von Starnberg when he could, when Rudi lay unconscious and bloody on the castle floor. When he was still an arrogant young pup, careless in his confidence. He never turns his back to Harry Flashman again.

And they both die many times.

Harry shoots a ball through Rudi’s lung at Vicksburg.

He is slaughtering Harry’s men, leisurely, laughing, strolling past their line like a Homeric demigod, ripping throats and tearing limbs with his newfound strength: and Harry levels his rifle, shoots so that the laughter bubbles wet with blood. Rudi, riddled with shot, sliced by several bayonets, sees Harry, stares at Harry, licks his lips, his glinting fangs, mouth silent now with a cascading froth of red, and he falls backward, the muddy Mississippi bearing his body away.

Harry knows then what Rudi has become, and he rushes to the riverfront; he forgets his men, who will only die once, and don't matter; and Harry is not sure how to kill his kind, but he will find Rudi and he will burn the body or sever his head, he will slice it into one million little pieces for the blackbirds, he will do whatever it takes to destroy Rudi while he is down. He is not brave. He is desperate.

But the body is no where. The banks are covered with only mortal corpses. 

Harry takes his rifle. Strips two dead men of their blue and gray uniforms. And he runs.

\---------

This is how it will be.

\---------

He is almost at the archway, he can smell the cold night air, and he is beginning to feel the exultant energy of escape, the heightening of emotions that comes from fleeing death, that makes him senseless with lust for blood and body and life, but there is movement to his side and a German soldier, stepping forward from a shadowy alcove, presses a pistol against Harry’s head, and Harry hears the click, and the world comes crashing to his feet, which freeze still, and he starts to stammer.

“No, no.” Calm and too sultry, too pleased, by far: a voice from far behind. “Hold your fire.”

Rudy, face ghostly pale and covered with blood, blood seeping even between his white teeth where he grins, stands at the bottom of the stairwell, leaning on a stone balustrade. He licks his lips. And Harry will think back on that sight; that Rudi loved the taste of blood long before his first death. “Bad form, play actor.” Rudi tsks. “Bad form to sneak away without saying goodbye first.”

\---------

It is all Lola's fault.

And were it not for Lola Montez, he wonders if the First World War would have happened. Harry lives long; long enough to learn that the difference in history is determined less by great politicians and generals, than by the length of a single sabre blade, and a dancer's long shapely legs. Beautiful Lola Montez of a thousand masks, whose face has filled more graves than Helen of Troy. It is all her fault.

He is on holiday in France with his wife Elspeth when he sees her. She is seated at a street cafe. She is talking to a gaggle of poets who nod sagely between polite glances at her perfect white breasts, her purposefully low cut dress, but Harry stares at her, at her deadly face, with such force she feels the stare, and turns and gasps, and he is red with rage, and shaking, and he weaves through the crowd toward her table to thrash her, to beat her for the pain she's put him through, for stealing from him the crown jewels of Strackenz after all that he went through to steal them first, and he has his hand raised.

And he's holding her against the wall of her apartment; he was always a massive, strong man; and he's thrusting into her so that it must hurt, but she fucks like a maenad, like ecstatic frenzy, eyes wild and red lips parted with loud moans, her whispers that turn husky and Irish in his ear, for all that she says she's Spanish, German, French. The fury of Lola's love-making is feverish and she scratches his back bloody when she bites him.

The room spins bright and dizzy. Fantastic colors and blackest blacks. He is in pain. He is screaming. He is on his back and he tastes a liquid that is copper and salt and then slowly tastes like pomegranate wine and if he drinks it all he'll never be allowed to leave hell and he drinks it all. When he wakes everything is the same but as if it is at the end of a telescope, smaller and further away.

He is hungry. He fucks Lola again, his head burning, he is alive.

And Lola takes him to drink from poets, laughing.

And together they take Elspeth to the art museums and Elspeth takes to Lola like a moth to the flame and they fall in love by the time Mona Lisa smiles. Stupid, stupid girl, my stupid girl, Harry watches, fondly.

\---------

Harry can't control it, in death he is filled with the feeling of life that once only came to him during times of danger, when he survived by insane odds; he later discovers this is adrenaline, and he is monstrous with it, constantly hungry and horny and he slaughters working girls throughout Whitechapel. Lola screams and sends him to follow battlefields like a camp whore, moaning for blood, he is still not brave, he is too scared to die, so he massacres to live. And at Vicksburg he shoots Rudi.

\---------

The sharp of Rudi's sabre is pressed to his throat and it slices Harry, lightly, when his body is pushed forward by each thrust from Rudi, but Rudi's hand is too steady to let it cut deep. He is the perfect swordsman, and despite all of Flashman strength, he finds himself bent across the table as Rudi takes him, small shards of the broken wine bottle stabbing his stomach. Rudi fucks steady. He speaks steady German to Flashman as he fucks, embarrassing little endearments and details of what else he will do, with the shackles in the castle dungeon and the sabre blade. Harry shudders, sobs, even, silently, and this is before the curse, and he is aware that he could end it all by slitting his own throat against the blade but he is very still, and he supposes he deserves this, for having done it to women before. Rudi finishes, breathy, kisses the scars on either side of Harry's face, and disappears. Harry lives. He pries the glass from his skin, weeks later the scabs break when he rides his horse, and Elspeth remarks sweetly that his shirt is ruined, why, that's alright. 

\---------

Harry's strength is better than Rudi's skill when he drops down beside him in the trench and twists his bayonet beneath Rudi's ribcage, brings it back, smashes the stock to his head. Rudi drops his rifle, sighs, it's foggy and starting to snow, snow that sticks to Harry's dark hair, and Rudi's German coat, as he hauls Rudi out of the trench and carries him as far as he can, where they are almost alone and almost obscured. Rudi is awake and tenses, “I will snap you like a twig” Harry says and he will, so Rudi accepts being thrown to the muddy ground, where Harry uses his bayonet to help tear down Rudi's trousers and Rudi helps and he's growling that he'll turn Rudi's threat against him, so Rudi was going to have him with a sabre, was he? all those years ago, and he grabs his rifle and he stops.

Until Rudi begs him for it.

\---------

Harry travels to the United States and murders respectable men and buys everything expensive on credit and says he is Rudi von Starnberg. Rudi dances with Elspeth, hand tight around her wrist, and looks across at Harry, his lips above her throat, a curved smile. And that is the game they play, the little traps across the continents and centuries, and they fight and they fuck, Flashman's strength to Rudi's superior skills, and when they’re finished they die, except they can’t really die, not yet, not ever. Flashman tracks Lola to a studio in New York and she is surrounded by artists, mortal artists, and Elspeth is playing piano very prettily and Rudi is beating a famous young painter at chess.

“Harry, love. Welcome home.” Lola sings as he walks through the door, and Elspeth shrieks, tumbles from the piano bench to peck his cheek, the humans are chuckling and clapping, and Rudi smirks, but stares at the board, pushing pieces and Harry hisses. “Why him, Lola?”

She caresses a dark lock of his hair between two fingers. “Because you match my winter dresses, baby, but I needed a blond pet. Such curls, too, and you must admit, he is damned handsome in a uniform. Anyway, has he not been amusing?”

“All he wants is to kill me.” 

“Oh, I am sure.” She says. “It is perfect."


End file.
